<1> In Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic
Novel, Timothy L. Carens argues that colonialism influenced the portrayal
of domestic space in Victorian fiction, making the domestic novel a form
of “autoethnography” (12) which could regard England as if
it were a space of otherness. No matter how hard Britain tries to constitute
the colonial as its antithesis, infiltrations and seepages occur. Discourses
of the colonial cannot be sealed away from considerations of Victorian
society proper.

<2> Carens opens his book with a discussion of how the social critique
of novelists such as Charles Dickens, in depicting the fiscal excess of
Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit, “uses the figure of African
fetishism to critique the over-valuation of wealth” (8). To compare
English institutions to foreign idols is to borrow from the rhetoric of
imperialism to expose English hypocrisy. In other words, England understands
itself to be liberal on the home front, Carens argues, in contradistinction
to the Orientalist distinctions it finds abroad. What denouncing Merdle
as an idol demonstrates is that the English revel in their sense of superiority
as free and rational, yet in fact grovel before the same sort of idols
they excoriate non-Europeans as compliantly worshiping. There is nothing
here necessarily about the actual worship practices of non-Westerners.
It could well be the author is using stereotypes that he knows are stereotypes
to demolish certain domestic complacencies. Carens mentions Mikhail Bakhtin’s
famous discussion of Little Dorrit in The Dialogic Imagination.
Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia as knowing multi-vocality provides
a general basis for understanding both the polysemy and duplicity of the
critique of foreign idols.

<3> Carens’s second chapter discusses the evangelical origins
of blurred identities between the European and the non-European in the
nineteenth century. He argues that Thomas Hardy, even in the earliest
rural idylls, challenged the canons of representation in the novel by
bringing to light a country life so distant from the metropole as to be
virtually colonial. Emily Brontë also conflates rural and foreign
through her hints at Heathcliff’s possible African origins. If English
and non-European can mix so easily, Carens wonders, did this mean the
Victorians believed all mankind had a common ancestor? Carens correctly
notes that a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis must reject
the idea of polygenesis, that the different races of humanity are essentially
different species with different origins. Yet the “curse of Canaan”
argument, from Genesis 9, was popular precisely because, with its argument
that the descendants of Ham (read as Africans) were cursed to slavery,
it could justify racism without recourse to polygenesis.

<4> The idea of using the rhetoric of anti-idolatry to critique
other cultures also has Biblical roots. Notably, its use in the Bible
itself was as much intracultural as intercultural. Hebrews who did not
worship idols criticized Hebrews who did; the same rhetoric was later
used by English Protestants against English Catholics. Thus, in many ways,
imperial distinctions are being placed into a preexisting frame of moral
critique. This potential for Biblical tropes to operate outside the ossifying
nineteenth-century schemata of race is, Carens argues, part of what made
Evangelical groups such as the Clapham Sect potentially disruptive of
colonial norms in their anti-slavery agitation. Carens’s central
assertion, that evangelical morality provided a kind of proto-anthropology
that unsettled rigid racial binaries, is convincing.

<5> The next chapter, on the trope of the “juggernaut”
in Victorian fiction, compares the immovable comic bluster of Sir Willoughby
Patterne in George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) to the
prodigious Hindu idol. The disestablishment of Sir Willoughby’s
hegemony and its replacement by a more humane and tolerant temperament
is, Carens argues, importantly tinged by colonial implication. Carens
states that “the language acquired Juggernaut during England’s
own moment of imperial power” (80), though he concedes that it was
in the language well before the days that Robert Clive conquered the subcontinent
for Britain in the 1750s. That words like “juggernaut” enter
the English language has globalization as its sine qua non. But it seems
a lexicographic as much as a substantive issue: many words have entered
the English language from foreign languages. But this phenomenon is not
always coincident with historical patterns of domination; for example,
Nahuatl words like “tomato” and “chocolate”, from
precisely those areas of the globe the British did not colonize, or “camarilla,”
denoting political cliques in England and Germany, without any domination
of the Spain where the word originated. Globalization of language was
present even in Medieval Europe (where, Carens notes, “juggernaut”
first appeared in English). It is not coextensive with imperialism or
even colonialism. But Carens makes up for any over-arguing by a splendid
bonus excursus on Jane Eyre, contending that Jane Eyre’s
earlier worship of Mr. Rochester, placing him on a pedestal that is knocked
down by the end, is intended as a critique of idolatry. This has its mirror
in the Christianizing mission of St. John Rivers, the suitor Jane rejects
for Rochester, who goes off to evangelize India.

<6> Carens moves on to an informative and challenging reading of
Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House and the relation between the international
projects of philanthropy she epitomizes and the domestic reform Dickens
ostensibly favors,. Dickens seems to make a strict division between compassion
on the domestic front and international philanthropy as represented by
the settlement of Borrioboola-Gha, based on the 1841 Niger colonizing
expedition, a “humanitarian” (83) venture Dickens sees as
hypocritically displacing reformist energies from where they are most
immediately needed. In fact the effective circle controlled by Esther’s
“enlightening care” (116) at the end is so small—excluding
the working-class and rural England—that Carens sees it as a de
facto retreat. Though Carens does not mention Liberia, his account
of the Niger colonization will interest Americanists and students of the
Black Atlantic, given that Liberia, whose colonization was similarly ‘humanitarian’
in origin, became independent not long before Bleak House was
composed.

<7> The fifth chapter, on Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
demonstrates that the novel foils its own attempt to set up domestic-colonial
binaries. Even the staunch Betteredge exhibits “the fanaticism of
heathen religions” (126). Collins seeks to develop a domestic reverberation
of colonial rhetoric that would critique elements of non-Western social
organization on behalf of democratic principles. Collins re-literalizes
these principles, making them more than slogans for foreign export, not
to be applied back home. The Moonstone is, in an oblique way,
a kind of Mutiny novel, registering in a sidewise manner the anxieties
about governance of and potentially by Indians aroused by the 1857 rebellion.
Mutiny abroad can also signal upheaval back home. More generally, Carens
foregrounds Collins’s “reluctance to endorse sharp distinctions
between English and Indian subjectivity” (199) most obviously in
the liminality and mestizaje epitomized by Ezra Jennings.

<8> Carens’s final chapter is devoted to George Meredith’s
little-analyzed Lord Ormont And His Aminta (1894) . Lord Ormont
is a colonial grandee who, Warren Hastings or Governor Eyre-style, has
trespassed the delicacies of the colonial mandate by using excessive force.
Returning to England, he tries to wield power over his wife Aminta in
a similarly authoritarian way. Most critics have regarded Aminta’s
eventual elopement with her younger and more humane lover, Matthew Weyburn,
as a Forsyte Saga-style triumph of reformist liberalism over
rigid conservatism. But Carens points out that even reformed, liberal
control is still control. Aminta at the end is set up by Weyburn as the
mistress of a school managed by him–and one with no female pupils.
Carens links this always-reforming yet never-fully-reformed state, to
more liberal theories of Indian governance that envisioned independence
at some far time in the future, but relied on rhetorics of deferral to
postpone this future into the asymptotic indefinite. (That Meredith, like
Dickens, was pro-Governor Eyre in the controversy over the official’s
abuse of Jamaicans in the 1860s adds some empirical ballast to this interpretation).
Carens chides critics of Meredith for not taking imperial referents sufficiently
into account. His discussion of Aminta’s relationship with Weyburn
should be a fillip to such efforts. It also makes one wonder about limits
of the supposedly liberal relationship between Dorothea Brooke and Will
Ladislaw in Middlemarch, or that between Gwendolen Harleth and
Daniel Deronda in Eliot’s novel of the latter name, if the two had
ended up together.

<9> Carens has written a historically sensitive and strongly argued
book. Aware that the colonial situation of, say, India and Africa are
very different, he gingerly avoids any general theory of colonial tropology.
Yet the idea of Christian Europe using the rhetoric of liberalism to position
itself advantageously with respect to non-Christian or non-European countries
may require such a theory. Indeed, this phenomenon may well go beyond
colonialism, towards a larger idea of Eurocentrism or even what Jacques
Derrida termed logocentrism.

<10> Whereas Carens focuses on largely canonical works, in Victorian
Sensations Richard Fantina and Kimberly Harrison include, besides
essays on The Moonstone and The Woman In White, treatments
of Collins’s lesser-known works and novels by Charles Reade and
J. Sheridan Le Fanu in addition to the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
The interest in these writers has recouped for contemporary academia the
centrality of the sensation novel in the twenty-first century that it
had in the nineteenth-century publishing marketplace. The essays are arranged
by theme, rather than author, so that Le Fanu, Collins, and Braddon show
up in all three of the sections.

<11> The first part of Victorian Sensations canvasses
the definition of the sensation novel as a “generic hybrid”
(xxii). Ellen Miller Casey shows, in her analysis of the reviews of sensation
novels in the Athenaeum Weekly, that the reviewers grudgingly
conceded the entertainment values of the books even as they carefully
reserved praise for the moments where the novels could be said to move
toward greater realism. Richard Nemesvari then trenchantly diagnoses the
sensation novel’s emergence as the beginning of a split between
high and low in the audience of the novel genre that foreshadowed the
emergence of both ‘high’ modernism and ‘low’ genre
fiction and thus the breakdown of the Victorian representational consensus.
Catherine J. Golden gives support to Nemesvari’s thesis as she excavates
the self-referential and metafictive aspects of Braddon’s The
Doctor’s Wife (1864). In another close reading of a Braddon
novel, Albert C. Sears argues that Vixen (1879) both is conscious
of and subverts the generic norms Braddon had helped establish in her
earlier fiction. Dianna Vitenza discusses Charles Reade’s Griffith
Gaunt (1866; recently reissued by Traviata Press). Vitenza builds
on Sears’s argument about Braddon by arguing that Reade knowingly
experimented with sensationalist devices. This interpretation of Reade
sets up co-editor Fantina’s treatment of this suddenly re-emergent
author. In a volume where queer perspectives are otherwise under represented,
Fantina argues that Reade gives serious thought to gender nonconformity.
In A Woman-Hater (1877), Reade clearly represents a relationship
that, applying later terminology, would have been described as lesbian.
Fantina makes the observation that Rhoda Gale in A Woman-Hater
is based on the well-known maverick female physician Sophia Jex-Blake,
a point that could be the basis of a noteworthy monograph.

<12> Sensationalism, like the Gothic, can be seen as a reaction
to science. But the very idea of sensation and sensationalism is a physical
and psychological one that needed scientific language to delineate its
scope. Devin Zuber’s essay on the Swedenborgian aspects of Uncle
Silas conveniently crystallizes the discourses of science, imagination,
and the paranormal, far more in dialogue in the Victorian era than they
later became. Tamar Heller (whose absence from a collection like this
would be unimaginable) starts off the section on gender by analyzing “disembodied
embodiment” (99) in the fiction of Le Fanu’s niece, Rhoda
Broughton. Heller sketches Broughton’s representation of women’s
bodies as both corporeal and pneumatic, ethereal and concrete, in a way
that enacts a “protofeminist somatophobia” (98) whose liberating
energies are constrained by its half-capitulation to gender stereotypes.
Galia Ofek writes on a specific aspect of the body–hair–usefully
cataloguing the hair color of many Victorian heroines. Ofek reframes the
hair question out of romance-style Rowena-and-Rebecca contrast by demonstrating
how sensation novelists unhinged the connection between golden or blonde
hair and normative purity. In doing so, she shows the contribution greater
attention to the sensation novel can make to the history of novelistic
representation as a whole. Andrew Mangham explores The Woman in White
considering the panic over women’s sexuality in the 1860s,
which even led some male obstetricians to recommend cliterodectomy “as
a cure for mental instability in women” (117). Though Walter Hartright
appears to play an emancipatory role for women in his rescue of Laura
Fairlie, the entire figure of Anne Catherick as double testified to the
heterosexual anxieties he suffers as much as does the more obviously heteropatriarchal
Sir Percival Glyde (what Carens says about Meredith’s Matthew Weyburn
is a useful parallel here). Other aspects of women’s social definition
are ventilated in Lindsey Faber’s discussion of sisterhood and Jennifer
Swartz’s treatment of inheritance law in The Moonstone,
which, for obvious reasons, could have also potentially included No
Name.

<13> The final section of Victorian Sensations is devoted
to race, class, and culture. Co-editor Harrison focuses on Braddon’s
little-known The Octoroon (1861-2). She shows how United States
slavery was seen as an exception, to be denounced as it was outside British
imperial borders. Thus the novel’s excoriation of it did not necessarily
indicate desire for racial or social equality within Britain. Yet, Harrison
states, Braddon nonetheless semi-inadvertently advertised more porous
social formations. The essay is a good complement to Carens’s chapter
on the Niger River settlement. Lillian Nayder, whose work on Collins is
often cited by the other contributors, refreshingly gives a sustained
analysis of one constitutive image—the window in Braddon’s
Aurora Floyd (1862). Vicki Corkran Willey somewhat precipitously
assumes that Collins shared Dickens’s pro-imperial views because
of his friendship with Dickens (Carens, for one, would differ), then sensibly
analyzes the positive aspects of Ezra Jennings’s racial hybridity
in a way that complements Carens’s chapter. Monica M. Young-Zook
takes up a less analyzed Collins novel–Armadale, possessing
perhaps the most complex and “overdetermined” (234) plot in
Victorian fiction. Young-Zook shows us how Ozias Midwinter is gendered
and Lydia Gwilt is racialized. This overlap of subject positions liberates
the characters from traditional constrains that in other novels would
dictate Midwinter be trammeled into the role of helping character, Gwilt
into reprimanded harridan. Young-Zook shows that the novel’s willingness
to experiment in depicting racial and gender positions mirrors its experiment
in form. Why does Young-Zook refer to (Miss) Jane Blanchard in Armadale
as “Ms. Blanchard”? Just because “Miss” is not
contemporary usage for unmarried woman does not mean the Victorians did
not use it. Also, Young-Zook implies a relationship of direct ethnogenetic
ancestry between Celtic Scots and Englishmen, which is misleading.

<14> The actress Avonia Jones’s performance in the stage
version of East Lynne, according to Andrew Maunder, shows that
melodrama can combine as much as contrast opposites, particularly when
it came to the working-class imagination. In an especially rich essay,
Tamara S. Wagner examines the interrelationship between sensationalism
and suburbia, deploying Collins’s Basil (1852) as a case
study. Wagner’s concrete and contextualized sketching of Victorian
suburbia adds depth to the Franco Moretti-inspired analyses of novelistic
geography that have recently proliferated.

<15> The Victorian image of the sensation novel was pejorative,
so “quality” novelists rarely produced works that received
that appellation. Yet Diana Archibald’s lucid treatment of Oliver
Twist suggests the collection might have been improved by more attention
to the sensationalist aspects of novelists usually deemed outside the
category. The essays nibble around the edges of George Eliot’s sensationalist
aspects (The Mill On The Floss is mentioned), trace William Makepeace
Thackeray’s (Vanity Fair) and all but ignore Anthony Trollope’s
(Phineas Redux is cited, The Eustace Diamonds is also
a natural candidate). More gender theory might have strengthened the essays
at times. Nancy Welter’s use of Irigaray in discussing the lesbian
aspects of “Carmilla” and “Goblin Market” is deft.
But Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler also could have informed several
of the arguments, however laudable the essays are in not slathering theory
over material just as well treated in a more ground-level historical way.
A minor lack is the absence of any mention of Henry Kingsley, whose Recollections
Of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859) was a hybrid of the sensation novel and—given
his sojourn in Australia—the colonial novel. Analysis of Kingsley’s
text might have been a good supplement to the general assertions about
colonialism throughout the collection. Finally, the editors perhaps overstress
how the sensation novel is on the way back today. Its academic resurgence
is impressive. But the book’s mention of the Andrew Lloyd Webber
musical version of The Woman In White—which was not a financial
success on Broadway—shows the limits of this sort of argument with
reference to popular culture.

<16> The bibliography of Victorian Sensations is particularly
thorough, listing both primary and secondary texts. It gives a vital overview
of research possibilities in the field. Like the entire book, the bibliography
is compiled with expert care and a dedication to amplifying discussion
in this emerging field. As with Carens’s book, Victorian Sensations
(appropriately illustrated with a wonderful Augustus Egg painting
on the cover) provides a thorough orientation to questions currently being
explored with ever greater rigor and gusto in Victorian studies.